Uman @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - 'After all the things …' Exhibition

Uman: After all the things …

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

October 19, 2025 - May 10, 2026

Uman 

melancholia in a snowy walk, 2025

© Uman

Courtesy of the artist, Nicola Vassell Gallery and Hauser & Wirth 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Uman’s first institutional solo exhibition, After all the things …, where she debuts a new body of work that includes paintings, works on paper, video, and sculpture, all of which span the entirety of the Museum’s first floor galleries. The exhibition is on view at The Aldrich through May 10, 2026.

Uman’s practice is interdisciplinary and ever-evolving. Comprising painting, drawing, murals, mosaic, sculpture, and glass, her work is rooted in the tangibility of color and the transportive power of images. Shaped by memories, dreams, and the constant flux of life around her, Uman’s visual language is intuitive and multilayered, adaptable and free; it is neither exclusively abstract nor metaphorical—it grows out of what is indeterminate and into the transcendent. Uman’s inspirations range from her childhood in East Africa and diasporic experiences in Europe and the US, to a love for textiles and transcontinental fashion. Her subject matter evokes the flamboyant fabrics worn by women in the Somali bazaars, the slanted flourishes of Arabic calligraphy taught in the madrasas, and the vast countryside of Kenya and Upstate New York.

Created with oil, acrylic, spray paint, oil stick, and even sometimes incorporating elements of collage and sewing as well, Uman’s compositions dance with animated hues and phantasmagoric patterns. She favors solid and bold colors—reds, yellows, greens, and blues—that she uses to create spirals, grids, and pendants, all-seeing eyes, circles and stars, interspersed with whimsical creatures and native botany. Working on many pieces simultaneously, Uman builds her pictorial arrangements—many of which reference nineteenth-century French painting, surrealism, and visionary abstraction alongside the natural world—with energetic mark making methods, using dry brushes and even her fingers and palms, resulting in surface treatments that disrupt the conventional distinction between paintings and drawing. Fusing art history with autobiography and spirituality with reality, Uman’s work pursues the metaphorical through a close attention to, and reverence for, the natural world. 

A publication, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., accompanies the exhibition, featuring an essay by the curator, images of the works on view, and installation images.

Artist Uman

Born in Somalia, Uman was raised in Kenya before migrating to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York in her early adulthood. Reflecting her experiences growing up across continents and cultures, her vibrant visual vocabulary draws upon memories of her East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams, and fascination with kaleidoscopic color. In 2010, she relocated to Upstate New York, where she currently lives and works.

Uman has had solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London and Zurich; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Fierman, New York; Anne De Villepoix, Paris; and White Columns, New York. She has been featured in group exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; For-Site Foundation at Fort Mason Chapel, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Karma, New York; and Ramiken Crucible, New York. In 2022, she was the recipient of the inaugural grant for The Cube at TRIADIC’s FORMAT Festival in Bentonville, AR. This year, her work is exhibited at the 12th SITE SANTA FE International. 

The exhibition at The Aldrich will be followed by a survey at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. A public program related to both exhibitions will be presented at the Hessel in 2026.

Uman: After all the things … is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 

www.thealdrich.org

Aldrich Box: Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar and Koyolzintli @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Aldrich Box: Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar and Koyolzintli

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

July 9, 2025 - September 30, 2026

Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar 

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Are, 2021. 

Courtesy of the artist

Koyolzintli 

Whistling Jar, 2025 

Courtesy of the artist

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents the 2025 Aldrich Box. Inaugurated in 2021, the Aldrich Box is an ongoing annual series featuring a year-long traveling exhibition housed in a box, available for loan to the public free of charge. For this series, the Museum commissions artists to create participatory objects meant to be handled and to travel beyond the boundaries of its walls. This year’s edition features two artists: Mongolia-based artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar, which has debuted in July, followed by Kingston, NY-based artist Koyolzintli in September. Their contributions are on view for an entire year..

In past years, the public has been invited to take the Aldrich Box home to engage with the contents in varied environments. This year, for the first time, the Aldrich Box is sited on the Museum’s campus for the public to interact with en plein air. Visitors accesses the Aldrich Box by checking in at the Museum’s Front Desk during open hours to obtain a key and instruction guide.

Artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar

Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar has created Channeling our human energy for the journey ahead, 2025, an object he describes as a “travel kit,” featuring a copper outer shell adorned with imagery of human ears and an interior outfitted with faux fur, a mirror, and goat horns. Erdenebayar’s practice spans sculpture, video and performance, drawing from Mongolian mythology and exploring themes of resistance, protection, and survival. For the Aldrich Box, Erdenebayar focused on the concept of nomadism—a foundation of Mongolian culture and ancestral traditions—symbolizing a profound connection to the natural world. By transforming the museum visitor into a traveler, Erdenebayar’s object has been reimagined as a “treasure purse,” shrine, or shamanistic tool. Equipped with a handle to suggest its portability, its reflective copper surface alludes to Mongolia’s significant copper industry. The goat horns inside evoke movement, strength, and protection, while the mirror serves not only as a tool for self-reflection, but also as a symbolic portal to the spirit realm.

Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar (b. 1992, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) earned a BA from City University of New York, Hunter College in 2015 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. His works have been shown in numerous locations globally including BLUM, Los Angeles in 2020; Frieze, New York in 2020; Half Gallery, New York in 2021; Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021; Red Ger Creative Space, Arts Council of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2022; Art Basel Hong Kong in 2024; Lkham Gallery, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2024. In 2019, Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar represented Mongolia at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Artist Koyolzintli 

Koyolzintli’s practice encompasses sculptures, drawings, photographs, performance, and video. Born in New York and raised between the Pacific coast and the Andean mountains of Ecuador, Koyolzintli’s research into pre-American sound instruments has influenced her objetos sonoros – Sound Objects, which she believes hold and carry forward ancestral memory, ritual, and storytelling about the land and indigenous wisdom. For the Aldrich Box, Koyolzintli has created Whistling Jar, 2025, a work activated by water. “Its resonance,” she explains, “will connect the latitude of The Aldrich to that of our celestial super star, the Sun.” Whistling Jar will be accompanied by instructions on how to play it, as well as a brief meditation to be performed before activation. For the artist, this work is deeply connected to the land, the position of the Sun over the Museum’s Sculpture Garden, and the birds singing in the trees, carrying both ceremonial significance and site-specific resonance.

Koyolzintli (b. 1983, New York, NY) lives and works in Ulster County, New York. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the United Nations, New York, NY; the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; and Paris Photo, France. She has had two solo exhibitions at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, New York, NY; a solo exhibition at Leila Greiche, New York, NY; and was included in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 at El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. Koyolzintli has performed at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Queens Museum, New York; Performance Space, New York, NY; Dia Chelsea, New York, NY; and Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY. Koyoltzintli has taught at California Institute of the Arts, School of Visual Arts, International Center of Photography, and the City University of New York. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; New York Foundation for the Arts; We Women; the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF); and most recently the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP.

Aldrich Box is organized by Director of Education Namulen Bayarsaihan and Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

thealdrich.org